Towards a Theory of Melody
Björn E. F. Lindblom, Johan Sundberg · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1970
Given a certain well-defined class of melodies, what are the principles and laws by means of which the metric, harmonic, and tonal facts of these melodies can be derived? The present paper describes an attempt to formulate such a system of rules that specify the logical organization of melodic structure in a set of Swedish nursery songs. Our approach is based on the assumption that fundamental rules of linguistic prosody underlie the composition of such melodies. A large body of metric, harmonic, and tonal data can be accounted for with the aid of this assumption. Our results indicate many parallels between the organization of linguistic and musical structure and support the idea that musical processes cannot be adequately described in terms of Markovian or stochastic models; rather, our results indicate that available evidence suggests that the formal machinery developed within the study of language may turn out to be of value also in the construction of future theories of music. The paper contains taped illustrations of melodies that can be generated with the present system of rules.